News archive

It was commemoration and recognition that brought the one-time prisoner of war and concentration camp inmate Alexandr Afanasjew to Germany shortly before May 9, the day marking Russia’s victory over Nazi Germany. The ninety-four-year-old came to the International Tracing Service (ITS) with his daughter and...

On 3rd May 1945 more than 6,000 concentration-camp prisoners died during the bombardment of the ships “Cap Arcona” and “Thielbek” in the Bay of Lübeck. The International Tracing Service (ITS) holds documentation on the identification of those who died from the maritime catastrophe as well as documents relating to the...

On April 29, 1945, the U.S. Army received marching orders to liberate the Dachau concentration camp. On their arrival at the camp, 32,000 survivors—many of whom were seriously ill—awaited them. The “first meeting of the International Inmates’ Committee in the liberated Dachau camp” took place the very next day. The...

Yom HaShoah or Holocaust Remembrance Day, which is observed on the 27th of Nissan in the Jewish calendar, falls on April 24 this year. This Israeli memorial day commemorates the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and is dedicated to the memory of the six million Jews murdered in the Holocaust. The central theme of this year’s...

International Roma Day on April 8 celebrates the multifarious Romani cultures and their histories. Initiatives and associations also welcome it as an opportunity to call for action against the massive discrimination of Europe’s largest ethnic minority. Even after centuries of persecution and their systematic murder by...

Floriane Hohenberg has been the ITS director for fifteen months. She pursues efforts to raise national and international awareness of the institution’s significance as a primary source of information on Nazi crimes and their immediate aftermath. In the interview she talks about the ITS’s new strategic orientation.

Jozef Maria Van Hees was thirty-one when the Feldgendarmes arrested him in Merksplas, Belgium in October 1944. The young man had aided the resistance and been found out. The Nazis deported him via camp Amersfoort to the Neuengamme concentration camp, where he died just a few months later, in January 1945. His family...

For many years, the journalist Thomas Muggenthaler has been carrying out research at the International Tracing Service (ITS) and other archives on the topic he calls “The Love Crime: Polish Forced Laborers and German Women.” In March 2017 he presented his film—winner of the Bavarian TV Awards—at the ITS and talked...